ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of English reformed piety: focusing on the sense of touch, but retained an important but unstable role in English devotional writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the sacramental writings of Thomas Cranmer, and explores his careful couching of sensory descriptions of devotion with unobtrusive stock phrases that would allow him, when pressed, to deny their literalness. The chapter focuses on the seventeenth century, and considers the ways in which Lancelot Andrewes dances between the literal and metaphorical meanings of the word touch' in order to insist that all actions directed against James one, whether a violent blow or a vindictive thought, are equally reprehensible. Ambiguously metaphorical language of the sort employed by Cranmer was crucial for the range of possible and contested orthodoxies that emerged in the later stages of the English Reformation.
